The Romance of the New

It is precisely the giveness of love that enables us to hurt one another. It's perverse isn't it? But it's been like this since the beginning of human time. The cliché "We hurt the ones we love" is true here precisely for the reason I've elaborated. People really do love: here to the point of familiarity. Like any child or creature really, we treat those things we are familiar with differently than we treat something new. Elliott first gets a toy and lovingly plays with it.. and in time (sometimes not very long) he's throwing it down the stairs for our dog to chase. We're the same way with people (which is largely why people have affairs: they long for the "newness" of relationship and all that entails), when the relationship is in its initial stages, things are more passionate, it's easier to forgive, easier to defer to our partners. Over time, this changes and the relationship loses its "spark". But if people could understand that the exact same process takes place when we buy a new car, or coffee maker, perhaps we could stop blaming the other person in the relationship, or even ourselves, and start thinking about this fundamental experience of human nature. You can see how in a consumer society the logical next step would be to buy a new product to replace the now familiar one (in essence an effort to recapture the experience, the thrill, the romance of -the new-). So, relationships become disposable, replaceable, and objectified (and so commercial). I think the same underlying mechanism is at work here in our approach to human relationships and commercial objects. It's funny, but sad too, how these relationships often fall apart and are as flimsy as so many of the "new" products being sold in our malls. We are children of our time.

So, how does one forsake here the -Romance of the New- for a -Romance of the Familiar-? Can we stop seeing one another as objects (which is a fundamental part of the problem playing into -or out of- our culture's rampant commercialism)? Are we able to break our addiction to our experience of the new, develop 12-step programs, form support groups, etc? Can we cultivate an appreciation for the familiar, which is an awareness? Or, are we doomed to long for our shiny new things like plastic crack addicts, like addicts of the human object and other new toys?